


And Still I Rise

by Ruta



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Drama & Romance, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-02-22 19:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13173789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: If I kill him, Rey finds herself thinking coldly during a meditation session.If even I could destroy the darkness that lives in him, there would be peace in the galaxy, but for how long? A generation of peace for ten of war. A day of peace is worth a thousand days of war?A voice inside her, so similar to Luke's, replies:A single day of war is worth a thousand of peace.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everybody! This is the first time I approach this fandom, even if I have loved this pair since TFW. I never had the courage to write about them, but after TLJ there was so much I wanted to write about that I started and here we come :)  
> I hope that the story wasn’t so bad as I fear it is. I’m not a native speaker, so I’m sorry for eventual mistakes (And for Yoda! In my native language, they translate his dialogues putting the verb at the end of each sentence, which is grammatically incorrect for us. The thing, I admit, has a little 'upset me while I was writing and translating because I get confused between my version and the original one XD So, I’m sorry!)

Everything’s changed now.

Time changes everything. Change the type of person you've been. The same is true for the people you meet and the feelings that those meetings sprout, creating relationships of friendship and esteem and affection that will define the adult you will be growing up.

Rey looks around, for a moment she’s disoriented.

The rough walls of the Millennium Falcon. Cold metal that in the twilight shines like molten lead and looks like volcanic lava. If she squints when she looks at it, she can almost see old incisions jagging the lamina at regular intervals. Past memories of an old life.

Yes, everything’s changed now. Nothing is. It's a macabre game of balances.

 

*

  
_Rey. If you are reading this, it means two things. Or that you came back or that I listened to the suggestions of an old friend and I followed you. For me it's time to face the ghosts of the past and the demons that torment my conscience. I decided to dust off what little remains of my honor and fight. For this, I thank you. I owe this choice to you and the courage that determined it derives from you._

_I had lost myself in fear of what could have happened if I had not been wise enough, good enough. For years I lived in that fear. For years I felt nothing but remorse and the shame of what I had done, of what I had been a step away from becoming._

_I lost my way because I was blinded by glory and past grandeur, by the story in which others had transformed my whole life. A myth, a legend, a hero. How can a man survive the weight of fame, of what a name entails? For years I could not. I lived in the shadow of what was expected of me, what I represented. The illusion of the impossible that becomes real and concrete and the wonder and the awe that accompany it. Not the man, but the last jedi, the last heir of an extinct lineage._

_Do not make my mistakes, Rey. Be yourself, true to your principles. Trust your instincts and do not let yourself be carried away by feeling. It can be a precious ally, but also your greatest enemy. Feelings are like waves of a tide that, in the long run, would overwhelm you._

_Live. Fight. Listen. Draw the path you want for yourself and not what others would like for you. Be proud and free and tenacious and strong. Be hope and peace and light and restore the balance that I helped break. Be the example that I have ceased for years to be._

_This is the burden I leave you. This is my legacy._ _Listen to the words of a tired old man and if you can, forgive the mistakes of the fool he has been._  

 

*

  
It’s all wrong. The story, what they tell of him... it's all wrong. Now Rey can see the enormity of that mistake, she can measure its extent. She swallows, hoping to erase the bitter taste that has invaded her mouth, but that remains, unaltered despite her bland attempt to mitigate it. While she squeezes the letter Luke left for her and Chewbe found in the little stone building on Ahch-To that for years was the prison-house of Luke Skywalker - _the man, not the legend, not the jedi_ \- Rey raises her head. With a little jerk that she is quick to hide, she crosses the tortured eyes of Ben Solo in the marked face of Leia Organa. Now that that parallelism is evident, ignoring the resemblance is almost impossible.

She does not know how to start. She only knows that she _must_ say something, she _must_ find words to the turmoil that lodges in her chest. But she does not know how so she says the first thought that crossed her mind. The hologram of an incomplete star map and a gray-eyed pilot, contemptuous of the universe and its inhabitants. "Han was right."

"About what?" In the way Leia asked there is the sagacity that has made her what she is, that has allowed her to preserve undamaged her spirit in spite of all that has been knocked down on her over the course of decades.

"What they say about him. The stories about you." Rey remembers. _It's all true_ , Han had said, but at the same time it had seemed he wanted to say that it wasn’t, not even a little bit. "Han was right. It’s all wrong."

"Not everything. Not what matters." Leia leans over to grab her hand. Her grip is firm and the gesture has something imperious that reveals at the same time traces of vulnerability. "The reasons that once pushed a boy and a smuggler to ally for the rescue mission of a princess do not matter. History forgets motivations, but not actions. Impulsivity and fortune become fearless acts and the rest is heroism. Years of loneliness, fear and remorse dig deep into a person's soul. So it was for Luke. So it was for me and even for you. I look into your eyes and I see the same desire for adventures that filled Luke the first time I saw him. I find him in your smile, in your sense of duty, in your thirst for justice."

 _I would have liked to know him in his youth_ , Rey thinks. _Before the disaster, before the failures undermined the armor of his determination_. But that thought is unjust, is it not true? She knew him for what he really was. Grumpy, extravagant, brutally frank, with all the merits and defects of the case. Rey closes her eyes and finally the two images of Luke do not overlap or hinder each other. Rather, they combine, amalgamating to perfection. An oxymoron, the balancing of what is light and darkness and of what is half-way. "How can I forget?" She asks and hates how her voice sounds imploring.

"You cannot," Leia responds, serious and composed despite the obvious fatigue and sadness that Rey manages to perceive radiating from her wounded figure. "What you can do is try to keep the promises made to yourself every day."

"I thought I was doing the right thing," she admits in a broken whisper. "I thought I could save him. I was wrong."

"What is that you cannot forgive? That you were wrong or the disappointment resulting from that mistake?"

"Both. I was so stupid. I let myself be deceived."

"Yes, Ben knows how to be very persuasive when he wants to. It isn’t hardly for me to admit that it's not something he inherited from Han." Leia winks at her and Rey laughs in disbelief, despite the lump in her throat. When Leia tilts her head to one side and examines her with a long, searching look, she does not withdraw. She feels something warm touching the edges of her conscience. Reassuring. _Maternal_. "Why are you so upset?"

Rey knows she cannot lie to her, but she also knows that the only alternative is unacceptable. How can she admit what she feels?

_Because for a moment, in that hall, I thought I was not alone in the universe. I had found the half that completed me and the sadness was a distant memory._

_Because I miss him. Even though I know it's wrong. I miss the sound of his voice, the hard line of his mouth that softened as he spoke to me. Turn around on her side, in the middle of the night and listen to the slow, rhythmic breath of a shadow beside her and the wonderful feeling of warmth that the discovery serves to light up. She misses their conversations. She misses their quarrels. She misses the days when she still did not know how it was to have a broken heart._  

Rey does not cry, but there is a part of her that is doing it. In silence, in secret. Curled up on herself in the belly of an AT-AT, while the twilight blows in a clear stabled night and the warmth of the day embraces the cold of the darkness. The wind roars and covers the sound of her sobs. Tears of impotence, of hunger, of abandonment.

Leia's hands caress her cheeks and there is something so natural in the gesture, so just in spite of the strangeness and the surprise that comes from it. It's the first time someone comforts her, that someone touches her like that. Not to hurt or manipulate or as a form of payment.

Rey opens her eyes and in the reflection of General's moist eyes she does not find fragments of the torment of Kylo Ren, but the reverberation of a pain as old as life itself, more ancient than the universe. It is a cruel and good pain, something that is also love, as deep as the mining pits and the cavities of Jakku, which proceed for hundreds of miles and reach the very heart of the planet.

"I know I'm asking you a difficult task," Leia is saying and her caresses are her way to say _I'm sorry_ and _Please, try to understand_ , "but if I do it is because I know you have the ability to endure it."

Now she will ask her to be a yearning for hope, the emblem of all that the First Order has failed to spoil and for which the Resistance fights, the bulwark that will defend the ashes from which the Resistance will be reborn...

"I do not want your powers," she corrects her calmly, as if reading her mind. "I want _you_ , Rey. I need an ally, someone I can trust completely and without reserve. You, Poe Dameron, Finn, Rose Tico. You are the future. What I ask of you is to help me protecting it. You can do it?"

A future. An abstract word, meaningless if not for distressing recriminations, a mirage in the desert. It never represented much for her. The future was a succession of days all the same, spent looking at the horizon in anxious waiting. A flower to watch, waiting to be caught with someone, but now... now it can really be.

Rey raises her chin and Leia's mixture of approval and pride warms her heart. "I can and I will."

She is already halfway out the door, ready to get back to training when Leia calls her back.

"On one thing you're wrong." She has one hand resting at the top of her chest, above the heart. In the dim light of the room she looks very old. The pallor that even the wise makeup cannot completely mask and the tremor that ran through her fingers shortly before, when she dried her cheeks. Crushed by the burden of too much responsibility, by the even greater weight of being the only survivor of her family. Every time has its own story. Every story has its time. Leia Organa seems to be approaching her terminus. The easy frown with which she speaks makes her think that when that time comes, she will go away fighting. "Even if you failed in what you set for yourself, it does not mean you failed on all fronts. You could not save Ben because you cannot save those who do not want to be saved. Yet you gave me back Luke and before him, you brought Han back to me. I will always be grateful to you for this." 

 

*

 

Her nights do not belong to her anymore. These are empty moments to be filled and what fills them are dreams. They are not beautiful dreams, not even bad ones.

To dream is to remember.

A throne room. The smell of death impregnating the air. A patchy rain of sparks and fire. And him, in which all the chaos seems to flow. Him, who seems to collect lights and shadows. _Him_. The bitterness of Ben Solo who disappears in the damnation of Kylo Ren.

Rey feels the pain burning every nerve in her body, the echo of Snoke's torture. In the wake of that pain, his voice.

Every night she relives that scene, observing it as an external spectator and at the same time reliving it again. Every night she resists the temptation to grasp the hand he offers her, accept the promise he gives.

Every night she refuses and the difficulty of her refusal is imprinted inside her more deeply.

Every night. Every night.

 _And if only..._ The first whisper begins one night. It is not bad, let alone cruel. It sounds true and therefore is all the more difficult to pretend not to listen to it.

 _I_ _f only he was different,_ the whisper says one night.

 _If only I was different,_ it ends a second one.

_If both were not who we are._

_Who am I?_

_Who am I._  

 

*

 

In the silence that suddenly surrounds her, Rey continues to undress. She just took off her boots. She is tired, after a grueling day split between a training session with Finn and an interminable military meeting. She is as tired as she never was even on Jakku, where idling would have meant certain death. It is a fatigue similar to a feeling of exhaustion, or the state of prostration caused by dehydration.

He is behind her. He watches her from the gloom and Rey feels the strength that spread from him, as if wishing to wrap her in a violent embrace. He seems satisfied and relaxed and his energy, when she seems to be totally devoid of hers, is likely to stun her like a pungent perfume.

"I should have kissed you that day." 

She does not have the strength to stiffen. Pretending nonchalance when the only desire would be to turn around to check the honesty on his pale and angular face, she continues to unroll the bandages first by one arm and then the other. "I would not have let you."

"Let me doubt it."

Rey snorts.

He does not seem to notice. "You looked at me like no one had ever looked at me before," he continues in a dreamy voice, absorbed in the analysis of the image he is evoking. "The way you watch the shooting stars. Like something impossibly beautiful, incredibly precious, whose memory you would like to keep forever with you, safe in your memory."

Rey bites her lower lip. She would like to scream and cry. In the end, she does not yield to anger or despair. She drops the bandages on the bed with a determined gesture and turns around. "You were, at that moment. When you allowed me to see behind the mask you wear." 

He takes a step forward, but something in her expression keeps him from approaching further. "Rey," he says and adds nothing else.

It is the first time that he calls her by name and she instinctively embraces her chest, closing her eyes to hold back the sudden heat she feels behind her eyelids, which presses against her eyelashes. "You are my enemy. We are enemies. What do you want from me? What can you _possibly_ want?"

It is Kylo Ren who extends his hand and puts it on her bare arm, but it is Ben Solo who answers her, insecurity and fragility and his need to be recognized, accepted, _loved_. "You."

"You ask me the only thing I cannot give you."

"I ask you the only thing worthy of value in this landfill."

_Why is everything so difficult?_

"Do you hate me?" 

"I don’t hate you," she replies unaccented. "I'm disappointed by you." For a moment she remembers the vision she had on Ahch-To, the sense of belonging she felt in that dreamlike dimension of something that did not happen and will never happen, not in the way she thinks and she feels so lonely that she could die for the nostalgia of all the _if_. "It does not matter. I will survive. I'm used to loneliness. "

"It scares you."

"Not as before. Now it's my choice." She feels him hold his breath as if she had hit him physically and she distinctly perceives the pain inflicted by that blow as if she had brought it to herself. When she begins to undress, he has already disappeared and the air in the room seems so much more colder.

 

*

 

"We both believed real something that wasn’t," she says after waking up one night and finding him intent on watching her sleep. She untangled herself from the sheets, irritated against him, and above all humiliated by the moment of weakness that made her look for him in her sleep.

"Liar. You cannot deny our bond." His anger is like a sandstorm. Extemporaneous and fierce, scratchy. Nothing she doesn’t know how to handle.

"I do not deny it." She pictures the moment their palms touched across the boundaries of time and space and then that in which he preferred power to her. "I _refuse_ it." 

 

*

 

 _I've never loved anyone as I love you. I love you and it is an endless torture. I love you and this destroys me. Do not you see it? Do not you feel it? It's killing me._  

 

*

 

On the battlefield they face each other without excluding shots. Theirs is a deadly and seductive dance. They gravitate around each other like satellites belonging to different orbits, destined to live close but separate. Each battle is marked with a new scar and both wear them with pride and dignity. Both show the marks they give to each other, as clandestine lovers separated by an adverse fate would preserve their love letters.

 

* 

 

Rey is surrounded by a noisy and polychromatic grouping of Resistance pilots, strategists and mechanics. She is seated on a bench, squeezed between Poe Dameron and a girl with sun-colored hair twisted in two round braids at the sides of her head that resemble earflaps. Poe is trying to get her to participate in a drinking contest while in front of her Finn is delighting Rose with the story of their first meeting on Jakku. Rey translates to the collective benefit the continuous intrusion of BB-8 that serves to undo the much more fictional version of Finn. At the fourth break, Finn beats her over time, turning to BB-8 with such an outraged expression that Rey finds herself laughing.

The laughter dies in her throat when the dizziness and the buzzing in her ears displace the thunderous noise of the joy and the roaring voices around her. He watches her from a corner. He wears the cape and has snowflakes in his hair curled by dampness. His eyes summarize the scene in front of him and then fix on her, hard and cold and melancholy.

"You are not alone anymore."

 _No, I'm not_ , she would like to tell him. _Not thanks to you._

The connection dies before she has time to repeat aloud what she thought. 

 

* 

 

 _If I kill him,_ Rey finds herself thinking coldly during a meditation session. _If even I could destroy the darkness that lives in him, there would be peace in the galaxy, but for how long? A generation of peace for ten of war. A day of peace is worth a thousand days of war?_

A voice inside her, so similar to Luke's, replies: _A single day of war is worth a thousand of peace._

 

*

 

"I've heard a lot of stories about that place." As he helps her load the supplies on the Falcon, Finn gives her oblique glances that Rey finds it harder to ignore with every passing second.

"I heard them too," she says, hurriedly.

"Why do you want to go there then?" Finn frowns and the anxiety surrounding him is perceptible and so noisy that Rey cannot help but drop the bag and hug him.

"Because I need answers."

Finn's grasp makes her understand that she has finally found the family she was looking for, someone to come back to.

 

*  

 

Where Ahch-To was water and sky and a spit of rocky earth, Dagobah is endless forests and marshes and a river of floating grass. With the sweat that permeates her forehead, Rey advances in the mud that reaches her knees, scanning for the hundredth time a section that she is sure to have already checked days ago. After the first week, she stopped relying on the map. She moves instinctively, recognizing in the broken branches of the bushes traces of her passage on the small airboat that she has built as soon as she has set foot on the planet. To search has never been the problem. The tedium of waiting is the difficult part, the forced inactivity.

Rey walks beyond a large tree from which hang lianas and climbing ferns. She stumbles into a submerged root, falling backwards on her back and that's when she feels it. A disturbance in the Force. Canopy sways above her head even if it does not blow a breath of wind and the air sizzles with static electricity. Then, from the most extreme point of her field of vision, as if he had always been there, but had decided to make his presence clear only at the worst possible moment, a gurgling laugh announces the revelation of a small hunched figure.

His skin recalls the moss growing on the bark of the trees and the wisdom in his ancient eyes is the first gleam of light in a planet that knows none. After a moment of stasis, Rey lays a clenched fist against the palm of her hand and bends her neck in deference. "Master Yoda. My name is Rey- "

"I know who you are," he interrupts her with a hoarse voice from the disuse. "Because you're here, I can guess. Drive away the temptations you want, the call to the dark side."

Too surprised, she cannot help but nod.

"All of you for answers are looking. Other wish you do not know. The first you aren’t that my advice for the same reason has sought."

"Luke?"

Yoda sighs, shaking his head in a gesture of discontent. "It was not Luke Skywalker who came here. Ben Solo. When the darkness gripped his heart still had not." 

 _Ben? But it cannot be. Unless_ \- Intuition makes her eyes open and a ravenous, hungry feeling dries her mouth. "Ben tried to get away from that darkness."

"What Skywalker saw was wrong. The whispers in the ear long ago started were already. Ignoring them learning he was.""When?" She asks quickly. _Too quickly_ , Yoda's gaze blithely reproaches her.

There is a veil of sadness when he answers. "Just a child he was." 

"A child," she repeats and from nowhere emerge images that do not belong to her, episodes of a childhood that was not hers. _The imprudence of a father tossing a dark-haired child into the air to make him fly and the pain when he cannot catch him in time. The sweetness of a mother who tucks the blankets to her son and deaf to his protests, turns off the light, not knowing that the monster under the bed really exists, is a snake that crawls every night and nestles at the foot of the mattress hissing lies and wickedness._ At the end of that long tunnel there is the ugliest and most terrible of them all. _There is the prone figure of a sleeping boy and a man towering above him, his eyes sparkling yellow and menacing in the dim light of the tent. The snake whispers in his ear the same lies that he has whispered to the boy since he was a child and the man believes him and yields_.

Rey wakes up as if by a long sleep. When she speaks, she feels the salty taste of tears on her lips. "Why did not anyone do anything?" And meanwhile she thinks: _He was only a sad child, alone and scared of the darkness._  

"Watch him as we should we do not have."

"Why did you show me all this?" She feels anger and sadness and above all compassion.

"The conflict in you I see and understand it I can."

"I know what I feel is wrong," she says. It does not seem wrong when it is night, she is alone and the hectic life of the Base remains outside the safe boundary of the space that has been assigned to her. It does not seem wrong when she searches for him in her sleep, or when he touches her and the pain of his betrayal is mitigated by an absolute pleasure that erases any other emotion. Rey feels like she might cry, as happens every time she thinks about the trap that is Ben Solo. " _I know_ , but I cannot help it." 

"Feeling necessarily wrong is not. Your heart is in turmoil." Yoda shakes the tip of the stick at her and squints. Rey has the feeling of being pierced from side to side. "I see compassion and anger and betrayal and love. You are attracted, but not by power. The road you have undertaken the most difficult is. Others have failed before you. Anakin Skywalker one of them was."

The name is not new, yet it is another that she, like millions in the galaxy, is used to hearing. Together with the dismay and horror and terror that accompany it. "Leia and Luke's father?"

"The Force in mysterious ways operates, but its paths, however hidden, anyone to achieve succeed. Anyone and at the same time nobody. He was just like you. Started at the Force too late. But this story to tell is not mine."

  
Yoda sits on a rock and Rey looks at him before following his example and sitting down on a fallen log. She puts her legs to her chest, hugging her knees.

"One more question you have," Yoda guesses and his seraphic smile has something that reminds her of Luke.

Rey stares at her hands. She has never felt so helpless or confused. There are so many people dependent on her ... that's how Leia feels? How can she rely on her instincts, her judgment? "How can I believe that what I do is right if I do not understand?"

Yoda nods with a faint murmur of assent. "Understand in order that you may believe, you want. Believe so that understand you may, you must. Not the other way. Fear of following the footsteps of Ben Solo you do not have to. Strength without wisdom collapses by its own weight and already more wisdom you have than many jedi masters who preceded you."  

 

*

 

 _Who are you? Draw your path and choose your destiny._

_Who am I._  

_I'm Rey. I fight for the Resistance. I will be the person I will choose to be from now on, day after day._

 

* 

  
The next morning, for the first time in months, Rey wakes up and her eyelids are dry.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Leia's is the first face she sees after landing the Falcon. The hangar is crowded with pilots and mechanics at work, which logically should make her identification more difficult in the crowd, but the value of a person is measured in something infinitely more important than physicality. Princess of a destroyed planet, senator of a Republic annihilated and repeatedly rebuilt from nothing, rebel fighter and general, Leia Organa is a proof of this. Despite her small stature, her countenance is a portrayal of dignity and a nobility of mind wich stands out from the fortunate coincidence of having the right birth. Her eyes are bright as it happens only on occasions when she is really happy and keep within them a secret smile that Rey, after more than three years, has learned to recognize.

Without realizing it, Rey accelerates the pace and soon finds herself surrounded by the warmth of her embrace and the sweetness of the scent of flowers that always accompanies her.

"Welcome home," Leia whispers in her ear.

With her eyes closed, Rey can almost forget the scorching disappointment of her failure.

 

*

 

Leia doesn’t push her to talk and doesn’t ask questions. She merely pushes a plate of spice cakes towards her and patiently listens to her frustration at the dead end that her visit to Xay have been.

Rey describes with great detail the high forested mountains that she had to climb to get to the first Jedi Temple, the bitter cold of the blizzard that caught her by surprise on the fourth day. She is silent on what she has found once she reached the top, but Leia has eyes to see and a perspicacity that helps her fill the gaps of that flimsy tale. She observes the weight that Rey has lost, her pallor and the persecuted expression that is carved in her features dug by fatigue.

She knows what Rey is looking so hard for. It is the same tenacity and stubbornness that once anchored her on Jakku in the expectation of a family that would never return, the one that now pushes her to find a way to bring Ben Solo back to the Light. Xay is nothing but the last stage of numerous and unsuccessful attempts.

_Dagobah, Yavin IV, Stewjon, Malachor, Ilum._

_Oh, Ben,_  she thinks, not for the first time, with a feeling that has stopped being anger in a long time to turn into something more gentle and indefinitely sad.

 

*

  
"Why are you still here?"

If Rey's voice is proven, Kylo's voice is dripping with genuine bore. "I could ask you the same question."

 _Typical_ , she thinks irritably. It’s typical of him to attribute to her the guilt of that attachment that nothing succeeds in corroding. Rey drops her staff to the ground and with an angry movement pulls back the strands of hair that are glued to her sweaty forehead. "Are you blaming me?  _Unbelievable_."

Kylo bends to pick up the staff. He also wears the training suit. Rey crosses her arms on her chest and focuses her attention on the outside view that the large windows show. A tropical forest. Torrential rain. Anything just to drive away the illusion that the image of him, dressed in that way and with her staff in his hands, serves to create. In a different world, he could be there with her truly and not as a mere fragment of a bond that forcibly links them to one another.

He hands her the staff and Rey reaches out to grab it. More than a year and a half has passed since the Battle of Crait and more than six months since she and Kylo realized they could interact with the objects that surround them during their visions.

"You want me to be here."

"I don’t want you here!" She replies, but immediately regrets the impetuousness of her response. Kylo bows his head and she claws her staff harder. She would like to touch him. She would like to comfort him. She would like to -

He raises his head and crosses her eyes firmly. "You want it," he repeats and there is a feeling that she cannot grasp in the depths of his dark eyes. A feeling that is fierce and determined and frightful and that has the ability to block the breath in her throat. "You want it as much as me."

Rey would like to hate him, but how can anyone hate someone just because has told the truth, however inconvenient and complicated it may be?

 

*

 

"Snoke is dead."

In the cave where she found shelter on the frozen planet of Ilum, Rey turns in the solid and deceptive embrace of Kylo Ren. Want it or not, he is saving her life from the unpleasant prospect of a death by frostbite.When he touches her jaw with his nose, she would like to withdraw. She doesn’t. The excuse of the heat radiated from his body is sufficiently credible.

"I know," she hears him say, and she can seize the sarcasm before he finishes the sentence. "I think it had to do with the lightsaber that cut him off."

Rey finds herself fighting against the absurd smile that pushes insistently the corners of her mouth upward. She bites her lower lip.

Kylo queues up to her in that strangely soothing silence. Outside, the storm rages and the beams of lights emitted by the crystals project the shadow of her body against the wall in front of her, flanking the ancient carvings imprinted into the rock. A few minutes later he is talking again. "What were you trying to say?"

Maybe it's tiredness that gets the better of her or maybe it's the state of torpor she's into. Or perhaps it is the fact that in this dimension of snow where war is a remote reality, all the controversies that separate them from insurmountable seem to suddenly become senseless. Or maybe it's the feeling of his body pressed against hers to stun her. The arm around her right side and the hand he placed on her stomach. The breath that spreads behind her nape. The way she felt his chest vibrate when he spoke. Perhaps it is simple weakness, a demonstration of lack of goodwill on her part. "If Snoke created the bond between us -" she begins.

He doesn’t let her finish. "It wasn’t Snoke," he interrupts her abruptly. Then, with greater sweetness, his thoughts make their way into her mind free of barriers, overwhelming her.  _We called each other. Even before understanding what was left of us, we knew what we wanted, what we always wanted. The usual, old desire._

Together, aloud, arms and legs clinging together like tentacles of a sea creature, both end up, troubled and completely sincere: "To not be alone."

 

*

 

"You will never return to the light side of the Force."

"And you will never go to the dark side."

To admit it, finally, doesn’t diminish the wave of despair and anguish that that simple truth provokes.

They are in the crumbling construction that more than thirty years ago was the main headquarters of the Order and the scene of the massacre that went down in history with the name of  _Great Jedi Purge_. Rey breathed in the dust accumulated in the halls the horror that still seems to permeate the entire abandoned structure. Now she’s on a little terrace overlooking the big city-planet that is Coruscant. She looks up and when Kylo's fingers intertwine above the parapet, Rey lets him. Even if it hurts. Even if in the future all this will become a problem, more than it already is.

"One of us will end up killing the other." She can feel him wince, but doesn’t turn to look at the anguished expression he must have. She knows him so well.

 _I_ _don’t want to cry on your grave,_ she thinks _._

_Neither do I, Rey._

 

_*_

 

Yost is the umpteenth old base of the Rebellion on which they have found refuge. When the First Order discover them, while Leia supervises the evacuation together with Rose and Poe and Finn stand alongside the new recruits for the firefight, Rey leaves the Falcon to Chewie and, deaf to every opposition, goes out to face the Supreme Leader.

On the holocron he sent her through a droid BB-9, while he was pretending for her to confront him, Kylo’s face was uncovered. Leia put a hand on her shoulder during the entire transmission of the message and with a twinge in her heart, Rey realized that probably that was the first time Leia has seen the face of her son after years. The scar that she was the one to procure him and that disfigures his features.

Now they are facing each other, around them the First Order militias deal the Resistance troops and there is a chaos of blaster blasts and explosions. Two x-wing squadrons dart over their heads, firing on the enemies below and raising a cloud of soil.

It’s Kylo to strike first, as always. Rey wards off easily. When they meet up with the lightsabers crossed at the height of their faces, she feels a déjà vu. Their first battle.

Kylo grinds his teeth, but the training has paid off and she manages to respond to his fury with equal fury and to every lunge with equal effectiveness.

"Leave the Resistance!" Above the roar of the impervious battle, the detonations and the wind, for a moment his scream seems to overpower every other noise. And even harder, the bitter thought that reaches her, as arrogant as he is and at the same time appealing, in the oxymoron that Kylo Ren represents in her eyes.  _Please_.

The memory of the skyscrapers of Coruscant, so tall and magnificent to be able to hide and obscure the brilliance of the stars with their artificial light.  _Neither do I, Rey_. In the echo of that memory, the eager fury and restlessness on his face take on a pointed, suffering outline that she shares. It seems to her to breathe the desert sand, which scratches every inch of skin and slips into her nose and lungs, blinding her.

Rey blinks, regaining control of her body. "I cannot," she whispers in a muffled voice and the cry of rage and despair that he emits makes her stumble.  _They are my family, the only one I've ever had_.

It all happens too quickly. One moment she is staring at his face, transfigured by the resentment for her refusal, one moment she is bent on one knee, the lightsaber in her right hand, while with her left she grazes in disbelief the wound that he has just inflicted on her side.

"It could have been me."  _I could have been your family_.  _You preferred them to me. Them, perfect strangers._

Kylo emits a guttural sound that breaks her heart and Rey cannot figure out whether it is because of what she said or for the wound that he was the one to inflict to her.

"You could have been, but at what price?" And meanwhile, she thinks:  _You gave me no choice. You know what I feel, but I cannot lose myself. Will it ever be enough? Will this torture never end?_

 

*  

 

At the next battle, this time on Berzite, for the first time it’s her whom seeks the fight. They fight each other as they have never done before. Each of the two is aware of what is about to happen, of their task.  _It's mine or yours end, this time._

Every lunge is brutal, precise and devastating. With a series of targeted movements, Rey manages to disarm him. Kylo Ren is at her feet and she overhangs him, both lightsabers in her hands and crossed so as to hold him steady under the jugular. The slightest movement. The slightest pressure would suffice and everything would be over. Of Kylo Ren would remain only the name and of Ben Solo only the regrets of a mother. Kylo looks at her without a trace of resentment or aversion and all the calm mastery that she has shown off during the fight disintegrates under an immeasurable wave of conflicting emotions. Rey drops his lightsaber and runs away, getting lost in the tumult of the conflict still in progress.

 

*

 

"You do it every time. They begin to notice. " _And to speak_ , it is the thought to which Finn gives no voice.

Rey continues to put objects in bulk into the backpack. "Let them speak."

"Rey".

She takes a deep breath. She knows what Finn means to and that's why she decided to leave. After Yost and Berzite she had the chance to face Kylo two more times and even on the last occasion she could have had the best, if only she wanted to. "I need space. I'm not strong enough."  _Maybe I'll never be._

Finn frowns, clearly confused and worried. "Strong enough for what?"

She hesitates. There is a sudden tension in her shoulders that she hopes that Finn will not notice. "For kill him."  _For let him go_.

 

*

 

Unlike Master Yoda, Luke doesn’t let her wait a whole week. The first evening she spends staring at the burnt tree that once contained the oldest and most precious texts of the jedi, he appears at her side, sitting on a stone. He looks younger and at peace and has a mocking smile that seems stolen from Han Solo.

If she were in a different mood, Rey would smile, instead she grimaces, clenching her fists harder and presses them against her forehead. "I cannot go on like this. I cannot do it anymore. I was about to kill him."

"But you didn’t. What made you change your mind?"

"There must be another way. A way to end the war without killing him." Deep inside her, she keeps repeating it non-stop _. There must be. There must be. There must be._ "What you told me," she continues. "About the light and the darkness that occupy their place in the universe, which complement each other ..."

Luke doesn’t speak, his figure seems to become more transparent with every passing second, but his eyes.  _Oh, his eyes._

Rey feels she could cry at any moment. "There  _must_  be a way."

 

*

 

A piercing pain hits her between the shoulder blades, so absolute that a veil of darkness falls on her eyes. The last thing she sees is the terror in the wide-open eyes of Ben Solo, the ashen face of someone who witnessed his worst nightmare come true. When she falls backwards, she doesn’t meet the cold and hard ground, but the solid arms of Ben supporting her.

 

*

 

The deserter doesn’t look at him with hatred. He looks disoriented. His eyes darted from the prone and wounded figure of Rey, curled up in his arms and so pale that he feared the worst, to his face distorted and deformed by fear.

A girl with shiny dark hair wearing a yellow suit comes forward, nudging the other to get him out of his apparent trance. Both make space for him.

Kylo follows them inside the ship and rests Rey on the cot. He pulls the hair from her neck gently and places two fingers on the vein to control the pulsations. The relief in finding them, though weak and infrequent, is so powerful that it stuns him. He allows himself a last caress to her pale face before getting up, straightening his torso and shaking off the bewilderment he still feels. "Take her away," he orders categorically and as he heads toward the exit he hears both follow him.

"You don’t come?" It was the girl who asked and Kylo blinks, amazed by the absurdity of that request.

But then the image of Rey's arched body, the way in which she has widened her eyes, the grimace that has disfigured her mouth, everything comes back to mind with the violence of a shot and for a painful, annoying moment the temptation to stay aboard -  _with her_  - seems an entirely reasonable option worthy of consideration. He sighs and every trace of energy seems to disappear with the speed with which the color has disappeared from Rey's cheeks after the blaster shot had hit her in the chest.

"I cannot." He hates how his voice sounds choked. He hates even more the humanity in the girl's black eyes, her expression of sympathy and understanding.

"This war will end up killing both of you," she says, more wise and old than she appears. "Do you understand what I mean?"

Kylo doesn’t answer, but something inside him stiffens and something else seems to fall apart irreparably. He turns his back with renewed resolution and the cloak moves with him, hiding his clenched fists from view as he descends the platform.

"Rey's wound..."

Kylo looks over the shoulder at FN-2187 and the girl.  _Finn. Rose,_  Rey’s voice kindly corrects him. "What?" He asks harshly.

Finn openly addresses his accusatory tone, without the slightest glimmer of alarm. "It's not a saber wound. It's a blaster wound."

"The one who didit, he'ss already dead."

Finn nods, impassive. "Good."

In spite of himself, Kylo smirks. "Good," he repeats.

 

*

  
Rey opens her eyes, but is forced to close them almost immediately. The light is dazzling and takes a few moments for her to get used to it. She is lying in a bed, in an entirely white room. When she tries to sit up, the pain in her chest is unexpected and so powerful that prevents her from breathing. A medical droid appears beside her and injects something into her arm.

The second time she wakes up, he is there.

He is seated on the only present chair. For a moment she thinks he's sleeping, but then, the tension in his back and the tiny, imperceptible jerks of his shoulders make her realize how wrong she was. It's stronger than her. An impossible instinct to suppress, a need that is impossible to silence. She stretches out her hand to stroke his hair and hears him holding his breath. He doesn’t immediately raise his head. Rey can hear him breathe noisily, as if he has to catch his breath after a long run. Still hiding his face, he takes the hand she still has in his hair and brings it to his lips. Rey can feel something wet against her fingertips when he kisses them one by one.

"I never saw you cry."

Finally he meets his gaze, all arrogance and bravado despite the dark circles around the red eyes and the hint of fuzz on the cheeks and chin. He is more Ben Solo than he has ever been. "There's a first time for everything."

"Even for dying," Rey tries to joke. "Only that once you try it, you prefer to not repeat the experience."

He darkens instantly and his gloomy eyes linger on the bandages around her midsection before focus on her face with severity. "It's not funny."

Rey sighs. "No," she admits, "it isn’t."

"He could have killed you," he says, voice rising and mouth suddenly closed in an intolerant and wary line. "You could have died."

"If it wasn’t for you." Rey leans forward and despite the sharp pain that the abrupt movement entails, she tries to take his hand back. He grants her with too much readiness. "You saved me."

There must be something strange on her face, because now he's staring at her like he's never done before.  _As something impossibly beautiful, incredibly dear, whose memory you would like to keep forever with you, safe in your memory._  He puts her hand in front of his face and leans it against his cheek. "I will always do it."

The light is dancing before her eyes, bright and glittering. Then someone takes hold of her voice to whisper hoarsely through her body: "No, not always. The day will come when your blade will pierce my heart."

The prophetic image that accompanies her statement has for the background the dunes of a bloody desert. Two figures wrapped in a timeless embrace against the backdrop of two suns at dusk. She wouldn’t mind such a death.  _If I have to die, the last face I want to see is yours._

When she regains control of herself, she feels completely emptied. The expression of repulsion and dismay in Ben's face upsets her, but not as much as his words, uncoordinated and shaken. "I cannot lose you again."

The painful contradiction of the whole situation collapses onto her at that moment. His presence, so dear yet so bitter. So close, yet never really with her, never hers. To have him without actually having him. A situation that has no way out, which offers nothing but a perpetual damnation and unhappiness.

"Oh, Ben." Rey untangles her hand from his tough grip. It seems to her that she has a kyber crystal instead of the heart. The cold that she felt on Ilum into the Crystal Caves is nothing compared to the cold she feels now, refusing to touch him. "You cannot lose something you've never had."

He withdraws suddenly and confronts her with sullenness. "And whose fault is it?"

"Mine. Yours. Does it really matter?" The fatigue makes her grumpy and abrupt. For once she doesn’t care. She avoids looking at him and she puts her head back on the pillow, closing her eyes as if the sight of him had become unbearable. "We have both chosen to fight on opposing sides of a war that is not ours. I more than anyone else. I'm tired of fighting. The loneliness. The truth about my parents. Unkar Plutt. The First Order. You. I am so tired. Let me rest. Tomorrow I will fight again, but leave me alone now."

"Rey..."

She doesn’t open her eyes.

"As you wish."

 

*

 

"They dismissed her too soon." Rose follows Rey with worried eyes, nibbling at the index fingernail with nervousness. Rey, who wanders around the base like the specter of herself, who responds to monosyllables to whoever speaks to her, who no longer makes jokes with the pilots, no longer comes up with a funny retort to Poe's shameless flirtations, doesn’t let BB-8 follow her anymore. Rey who seems barely aware of what she is doing.

"What's wrong with her?" Rose insists.

Something weighing heavily on his conscience, Finn continue to clean the speeder compressors he is working on. "She began to understand."

"Understanding what?"

"That she will have to kill him."

 _Peace_ , he thinks with foresight,  _has its price_.

**Author's Note:**

> Vis, consili expers, mole ruit sua: “Strength without wisdom collapses by its own weight” is a Latin phrase of Horace. 
> 
> "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand” is a saying of Augustine of Hippo.


End file.
